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Notes -
Rape charges (and this is rape, not statutory rape - she was 16 in a state where 16 is legal) are dropped more often than they are pressed to trial. You need a victim-witness who is able and willing to stand up to cross-examination, and rapists tend to target the kind of woman who isn't. This is the whole reason why feminists want to replace criminal justice for rape with kangaroo courts (at least for favoured groups of women like undergraduates living on campus) and criminalise even consensual sex in situations which are high-risk for rape - rape is a very hard crime to prosecute unless you have one of the rare fact patterns that make it easy like "man jumps stranger in the street and rapes her"
"Victim doesn't want to go to trial" and "victim is so messed-up she can't keep her story straight on the stand" are the most likely stories here, as in every other such case.
"Runaway mentally ill teen has what may have been consensual sex-for-housing and may have been kidnapping and rape" is an absolutely classic unprosecutable case. It's probably rape, but the main piece of evidence you need to get to the "beyond reasonable doubt" threshold is the uncorroborated testimony of someone who will read (fairly or not) to the average juror as a mentally ill crack-whore.
On the other hand, they could’ve charged with unlawful detention alongside all that- it seems like if she showed up consensually(and I don’t believe she didn’t understand the strings attached up front) they still tried to prevent her from leaving.
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